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Success Story with Scott D. Clary
Lessons - The Power of Language | Valerie Fridland - “Like, Literally, Dude” Author
00:16:03
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- [00:00]
A
In this lessons episode, explore how everyday language choices reveal identity and shape human connection. Discover how speech patterns build trust and social bonds. Understand why certain language features become stigmatized across gender and class, and uncover how cultural power dynamics influence the evolution of language over time. When we look at language and like our language choices, forget bias, but just our personal language choices, what does that say about our, our identity and our personality and our social relationships?
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An enormous amount. And I think that's the thing that people tend not to realize. You know, we see language in two ways, either good language or bad language. And if you speak good language, you're a good person, if you speak bad language or something wrong with you. But in reality, language is about social identity just as much as it's about communication. So think about, you know, things like, hi, how you doing? That we say 5 million times a day. They're really about making connection. Right. There's nothing informational in that other than, hey, I like you, I just want to check on you and let's have some connection here. Let's build a relationship. So it's relationship building. So a lot of times language is about talking in such a way that it invites connection, camaraderie, solidarity, and closeness, or it tells someone the way that you're approaching them. So we were talking before we went on about how you can change your speech over time as you become more informal, more casual, and that you've heard podcasters do that sort of over a couple of years. Well, the idea with more casual, informal speech is it's inviting. When you go home and you used an overly formal way of approaching your family, they're going to look at you like, what the hell is going on with you? Because who are you? You know it because it's weird. It's not. It doesn't speak to your relationship. So when you are in a conversation that was someone you just met, for example, and you sort of get that sense that you like them, that you're making a connection, do you stay stiff, informal in your speech or do you switch and start using maybe more contractions like gonna want to, have to. Do you start saying, you know, I always switch instead of will? Do you say things like walking instead of walking? Those are very subtle cues that we give each other about the relationship. So if you've ever been in a conversation does not shift. It's very off putting. In fact, you probably walk away with a bad impression about them. And that's the same thing as using things like discourse markers. Well, oh, so like, you know, those are about connection. And actually if you look at research on them, we find that when people take personality tests, more conscientious speakers tend to use more discourse markers. So it's actually the linguistic version of kindness when you think about discourse markers. So our dislike of them is really more about who has tended to use them historically more. So women tend to use more discourse markers. And it's probably a lot with women's speeches related to the position and the role that they've had compared to men for centuries. And women's voices have always been sort of vilified and told to be silent for, you know, since Aristotle. I think Aristotle had a saying that said silence gives grace to woman. So you know, that sort of tells you what he thought about women's voices in the public sphere. And then, you know, we used to put them in scold bridles in the Middle Ages if they talked too much and said things that we thought was blasphemy, which was mainly saying, you know, he sucks, we should get rid of this guy. Or you know, talking around the gossip circles and the water well that you had these feelings about maybe those in governance or people that were doing things you didn't like. Well, that was dangerous. And especially when women were saying it because women talked to a lot of other women and they talked to their husbands and then it could spread like wildfire. It was kind of the Internet, you know, the gossip circles were the Internet of the Middle Ages. And so they actually would prosecute women for sins of the tongue and put them in things called scold bridles, which was like a metal Hannibal Lecter contraption that held their tongue down so that they couldn't speak. So here's his history. And so we have always then been skeptical of women's voices. So that leads us to believe a women talk more than which they don't. Most research doesn't show that to be true. Women have less to say. It's unimportant, it's evacuous, it's empty headed. So that then gets assigned to the features they tend to use at a higher rate. So things like like or vocal fry or using a lot of intensifiers like very or so or pretty or really those tend to be used at a higher rate in women's speech. And the reason for that is that women actually lead in language change and have through time. So almost everything that you say today as a man was something that was started with a woman centuries ago. So really it's very interesting that women are very powerful progenitors of change.
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A
Can I ask something? So if historically women's voices were suppressed, how was it so that even though they were suppressed, the items in their speech were actually setting, like the. The precedent for how men speak in the future, in. In the next, you know, couple years or the next. The next. The next. The, you know, the next 10 years, men will sort of adopt some of these speaking patterns. How did that. How did that happen?
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B
Well, I mean, of course, the big answer is women are just cooler. So of course everybody goes after what they say. But the real answer, and we are cool, but the real answer is, what is. What is a role of a woman historically? So they are often the homemakers, they. The children. They are talking to their husbands when they get home. So we have this really interesting thing called intimate diversification, which is a big fancy word to say that unlike other subcultures that tend to be segregated. So if you look in a lot of cities, you'll find segregated ethnic enclaves, so that you have these different sort of backgrounds and different language choices, perhaps, but they tend to be relegated to very distinct enclaves a lot of times because of historical power differences and socioeconomic differences. But whatever the reasons, they're kept separate. So there's not as much borrowing across ethnic groups for features. Except, of course, now there's a huge amount of borrowing of African American features from like black Twitter and hip hop into white male speech. So that's a totally different thing. But women raise the children. So children tend to adopt initially, at least until they go undergo vernacular reorganization in school. They adopt the. The features of guess who? Their moms. The mother, their moms. So, you know, unless that changes drastically, and of course it has changed somewhat, it's still the case that that happens. So what we find is women are usually a generation ahead of men in picking up a speech feature. Now, this is not all features. There are. This is when you ask that question about what does our language say about us? It says a lot, A lot. So much it's hard to get to it all. We could talk for hours. But essentially, in the majority of speech features that have become standard over time, gone from being sort of less standard or just not noticed to being standard. It is women that have led in those changes. They lead by usually at least one generation, because when they have children, those children inherit their speech. So boys and girls inherit the system of the mother, first and foremost. And then they go to school and they start reorganizing their speech. We call it vernacular reorganization to be more like their peers and Then they pick up new forms and fashions in speech. And that is what we dislike as adults, right? This difference in our speech and the children's speec, because it says something like, this is youth culture and this is adult culture, it makes us feel old. And we tend to label what they do as sort of novel and undesirable. But in fact, a lot of it does end up staying around and becoming the norms of the next generation. But it's women more than men that in the teenage push language forward. So then we have this sort of leapfrog where, okay, women were a generation ahead, they had children, the kids inherited their generation, they go to school or their speech, they go to school with the same system. But then girls forge ahead another generation. If a change is going, is going to continue, the girls will push it forward, and then they give it to their children. So you have this kind of leapfrog pattern that men stay a generation behind until that change has moved to completion, meaning that it's sort of what everybody says and it's so, so widespread that there's no more leapfrogging. And that's when we find that men catch up. And that's when a new norm gets established over time. And so a great example historically would be, because sometimes it's easier if you have an example when you say, you know, he does instead of he doth. That was actually a change led by women. So we find in letters, of course, we don't have recordings back from back then, but in the early modern period, which was about 1500-1700, we find letters written by women, and we also tend to find letters written by less educated people as well. That sort of also gives us the sense that these weren't really standard features. In fact, it was a northern feature, a northern British feature, and it was finally adopted into London speech, which is when it became the standard. But we find does starting to appear instead of doth first in women's and less educated speakers, letters. And then about, you know, another generation skips forward and we start to see it in men's speech. So that's sort of what incrementally pushes change forward. Now, sometimes, of course, a feature gets very gendered. So little boys go to school and then they hear girls say it, and it takes on this very feminine tone. They get a very gendered association with that sort of like totally as an intensifier, and so they retreat. And that's where you find that changes tend not to progress or they become very gendered changes over time. Where only women do them to a high degree and men don't. And we find the opposite is true as well. Sometimes features become gendered towards men and women don't do it as much. So you know what we.
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A
And what would cause that? What would cause the totally to be a more gendered feature?
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Well, a lot of times it's the different types of sociocultural attractiveness that features Carrie. So what makes a boy popular in school? You know you were a boy, right?
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You looked sports. Okay, yeah, like playing sports, having friends.
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You know, being kind of tough in macho, right? Sort of, yeah, that kind of thing. And does that. Is that the same kind of thing that happens for women when a girl, I mean, they can play sports, but is sort of masculine bravado? Very.
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No, traditionally, no, no, it's really not.
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B
Femininity and more totally 180, right, yeah. So think about the types of features that boys tend to use. You know, like man and bro and dude are good examples of that. That it sort of is a masculine solidarity tough kind of guy or just the appropriation of hip hop language, you know, that type of thing, saying things like ain't. Generally women as young girls get vilified for their speech much more than boys do. So if a girl comes home and says, I ain't doing that, that have parents that have an expectation about what that girl should sound like, she's going to get ridiculed for it much more than a boy would. Because for a boy we kind of have this expectation of rough, tough kind of behavior. And so features that embody that kind of roughness, that toughness, that masculine kind of quality. Those are the types that boys tend to pick up, which is why they tend to be very attracted to non standard features. Because we have these stereotypes about what those speakers are like, even though they're completely cultural artifacts. Like the idea that young black men are dangerous and rebellious and non conformist. Well, that's, that's our interpretation of a speech feature that has nothing to do with the reality of why a young black man uses it. Right. Because what young black man might use a speech feature like thang or ain't or ain't or axe because he's trying for solidarity with a group of other speakers who have faced the same sort of social cultural prejudice as he has. And he has to have that. That's part of what bonds them is having a shared language. And it's actually acts is an older feature than ask. And that's what ask came from. Which is another thing that's wild.
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A
So you're saying like people. No, I just wanted to understand. That means that one group of individuals have completely adopted a language. I'm going to just very, very simplify this so I understand it. One group of individuals have adopted certain things in their language because of a certain social cultural norm. And then another group has misinterpreted that social cultural norm and then adopted things because of that misinterpretation. And then that's been brought up. That's really what's happening.
- [12:52]
B
Exactly what happens. That's exactly what happens. And the reason that ethnic features tend to be so popular. Popular among young men. So if you go to high school, I have a teenage son and so I'm. I'm. And he plays a lot of sports. So I'm around a lot of boys a lot of times. And sometimes it makes me laugh the way they talk because I want to say, do you realize what you're doing? You know, but they would totally ignore me and my son would never invite me to another game. So not going to do it. But what, what they don't understand is the reason those features are attracted attractive to them is because they're completely misinterpreting why they're used in the first place. They are used as sort of symbolic. Symbolic solidarity symbols for the groups that use them. In the same way that we use certain features like. Like or vocal fry to lay claim to other aspects of our identity. And those tend to be very predominantly kind of white and middle class features. And actually if you look at um. And I use. Which we should talk about at one point because it will blow your mind if you look at the distribution of use of those features. Men use a much more than women do. And upper class speakers tend to use more filled pauses than lower class speakers. So they sort of. It's funny how these different features take on these associations that are very subtle. We don't realize it, but they send messages to us about who those people are because of the very, very detailed distribution of those features in speech that we can't articulate unless we're a linguist, but influence us nonetheless. So when we see higher rates of certain things like contractions or palatalization, which is when you say things like wantcha did ya? That's called palatalization because it's simply two sounds coming together because of how they're articulated in the mouth that get palatalized, meaning the tongue moves more towards the palate. We find higher rates of that speech feature. Everybody does them, but we find higher rates in among non standard English speakers, probably because it is used as a language of communication, of intimacy, of connection. So when we shift to more informal features among our family members, it's because we're showing them that we're connected and we identify with them. So in communities that tend to have that as a very, very important facet of self protection against a larger dominant culture that tends to despise them, that's a way to show it is in your language is connection. So but the problem is a lot of times young men misinterpret those sort of signs of solidarity as also representing what those people represent to them from cultural stereotype, which is sort of dangerous and edgy and cool. And then to get that in their own Persona, they adopt those features. So that's sort of how that cycle works. It's pretty fascinating.
- [15:44]
A
Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.